Why Is the Antiwar Movement Stalled?

A recent gathering of the remnants of the antiwar movement,
sponsored by something calling itself the United National Antiwar
Conference, underscores the reasons why there is almost no effective
organized opposition to the present administration’s occupation of Iraq
and Afghanistan. One has only to look at the conference program to see
why the antiwar movement remains marginal, at best: a keynote address
by perennial leftist icon Noam Chomsky, who was paired with Donna
Dewitt, a left-wing labor official, and also featuring workshops –
reflecting some of their primary concerns – on “Health Care is a Human
Right,” “Deepening the Base & Building Bridges between the Climate
Change, Peace & Economic Justice Movements,” and – most telling of
all – “The Rise of Right Wing Populism & the Tea Party: Do We Need
a Right-Left Coalition?”

That this question is in dispute
tells us how misguided, and out of it, these people are. It also shows
how immoral and narcissistic they are: while Afghans, Iraqis,
and Pakistanis are being blown to bits, they are wondering whether
we ought to be building a broad-based movement that transcends their
petty sectarian concerns, or whether what passes for the antiwar movement
should be their own personal sandbox.

The panelists were Medea Benjamin of Code Pink; Kevin Zeese, co-founder of Voters for Peace; Chris Gauvreau of Connecticut United
Against the War and the National Assembly to End U.S. Wars and Occupations; and Glen
Ford, representing Black Agenda.

Now, I did not attend this
conference, and have no idea what the upshot of the discussion was;
however, Benjamin and Zeese have expressed their support for such a
coalition (the former somewhat tentatively, and the latter with more
conviction). On the other hand, one can easily imagine that Ford, who
has called the Ron Paul movement and the tea partiers “racists,”
and advocates of “white nationalism,” and Gauvreau, a leftist who
spent much of this
speech mouthing
all the expected slogans, see a left-right coalition as a deadly threat
to “their” movement. What’s interesting, to me at least, is that
the cited Gauvreau speech, made at an antiwar demonstration last year,
opens with the speaker bemoaning the fact that “It has been difficult
to build this demonstration.” The reason, he averred, is because the
media keeps telling us the war in Iraq is winding down or over – but
surely this excuse doesn’t hold true for the war in Afghanistan, with
casualties increasing daily and the carnage making headlines. Yet he
tries to put a brave face on it:

“Without a militant and
independent movement in the streets, exposing each and every escalation
of this war, we can expect only more and more desperate military acts
in the service of corporate America. That is why this demonstration,
though smaller than some held in the past, is a victory.”

Earth to Gauvreau: A couple
of dozen protesters standing around dispiritedly listening to a speaker
declare that the smallness of their demonstration isn’t their fault
– and certainly isn’t his fault – is a defeat, and there’s
no two ways about it. Any bystander who happened upon this mini-mobilization
would have to conclude, regardless of his own opinion of US foreign
policy, that opponents of US intervention are an isolated and
somewhat eccentric minority, with no chance of actually having an effect
on the course of events.

After long and bitter experience
in the leftist-dominated “peace movement,” I’m convinced that
this is exactly how the left sectarians who invariably dominate such
gatherings like it. In a real mass movement against interventionism,
their influence would be considerably reduced, and their ability to
use it as a recruiting ground to advance their organizational ambitions
would be very close to nil.

The sectarians of “Socialist
Action,” a minuscule Trotskyist grouplet which has been very visible
on the West Coast at “peace actions,” admit as much in a 2000-word polemic
published in their plonky little newspaper, and on their equally plonky
web site (Marxists don’t do the internet, and when they do, the results
are laughable). The piece starts out by averring that the model cited
by Zeese is the old America First Committee, which opposed US
intervention in World War II, as well as the Anti-Imperialist League,
which, earlier, led the opposition to the US occupation of the
Philippines. Without going into any detail about the latter example,
the author goes into a long disquisition contrasting the Trotskyists’
opposition to US entry into WWII with the AFC’s, hailing the “militant”
labor “sit downs” as exemplary, in spite of the fact that they had
nothing to do with antiwar activism. As the climax of the Trotskyists’
glorious record, Socialist Action avers:

“During the war, the Socialist
Workers Party organized to aid fraternization among working-class soldiers
of all nations, and they opposed the attempts of the government to prohibit
strikes for better wages and working conditions and to brand actions
by the labor movement as aiding the ‘enemy.’ Their militant opposition to the war and wartime assaults
on the rights of workers to defend their standard of living led the
government to indict leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the
Minneapolis Teamsters under the Alien Registration, or Smith Act.”

So, the Trots wound up in jail,
to the cheers of the Stalinists and the pro-war “liberals” – that
looks like a defeat to me.

Their account of the America
First movement repeats all the old Stalinist canards about the biggest
peace movement in American history: it was run by big businessmen, it
was “anti-Semitic,” it wasn’t really for peace, just pro-Hitler.
The article cites the considered opinion of James P. Cannon, the Trotskyist
leader at the time, as saying “the ‘isolationists’ in elite circles
merely held a tactical difference with those of their peers who were
for sending U.S. armaments to Britain.” Their real goal, he thought,
was to consolidate their control over the Western hemisphere in preparation
for intervening in Europe.

Cannon’s view is nonsensical,
as anyone who has read the writings of America First leader and top
activist John T. Flynn would readily understand: Flynn was a principled
opponent of US intervention abroad, because he understood what turn
of the century liberal Randolph Bourne meant when he said “War is
the health of the State.” Flynn and his co-thinkers wanted to limit
the power of the American state – a goal not shared by Trotsky’s
disciples.

In any case, what the Socialist
Actioneers fail to note, in their endless polemic, is that the America
First Committee mobilized millions against the war: it had 800,000 members
(dues-paying members, I might add), and a Washington lobby that very
nearly sunk Roosevelt’s ever-accelerating drive to drag us into war
in Europe. Massive rallies conducted on a nationwide scale kept the
Roosevelt administration in check, right up until the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. The War Party had to take the “back door to war,”
as one historian put it, in order to get us in.

So, faced with these two examples
– the isolated (and jailed) Trotskyists, and the massive America First
movement – which would any normal person consider a role model?

But we aren’t dealing with
normal people here: we’re dealing with sectarian ideologues, who fail
to see the implications of their own example. The rest of the article
is denunciation of the politics of Ron Paul, and traditional conservatives
who oppose imperialism: why, just look, they don’t support nationalized
health care! They are against open borders! They oppose Social Security!
Horrors! They conclude:

“To involve the great
majority of the working people of the United States today, the antiwar
movement must be a safe place for the most militant and combative components
of the unions and of community struggles. It must seem relevant to those
whose first waking thought is how to find a job or keep their house.
It must be welcoming to the 200,000 LGBT activists who recently marched
on DC.

“A united front with the
anti-interventionist far right, on the other hand, would require that
our movement drop its demand for “Money for Jobs, Not War!’
…It
would naturally draw in the openly racist Tea Party elements. Such a ‘united front’ would make the antiwar movement
uninhabitable by those most crucial to its success.”

Translation: a left-right coalition
would make the antiwar movement uninhabitable by the inveterate sectarians
of the ultra-left, whose only concern is to recruit naïve young people
into their dying little sects. Trotskyism, today, is about as relevant
as phrenology, and about as useful when it comes to building a mass
political movement of any kind – and the sectarians know it. They
are essentially parasites who converge on any “peace” movement that
arises and suck the juice out of it until they’ve had their fill:
then they feast on the bones.

“The unity that we need
in the antiwar movement today,” the Trots proclaim at the end of their
piece, “is the kind of unity exemplified by the United National Antiwar
Conference to be held in Albany, NY, on July 23, 2010.”

No. What is needed is not another
leftist-dominated “coalition,” which puts on conferences that address
the faithful, reasserts their well-worn dogmas, and sponsors marches
of a few thousand (at most). You’ll note that these marches nearly
always take place on the coasts – especially San Francisco,
that bastion of the left’s past glories – but never penetrate into
the American heartland. Until and unless they do, the antiwar
movement, as an organized force in American politics, will literally
remain a fringe phenomenon.

The irony here is that it was
the Trotskyists in the 1960s who really understood how to build a mass
antiwar movement: the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had a really effective
strategy and that was to make the antiwar movement during the Vietnam
era a single issue movement. The idea was to unite all who could be
united around a simple axiomatic principle: Get the US out of Vietnam.
Period. The SWPers were among the most energetic and effective antiwar
organizers because they knew the difference between building a
mass movement around the issue of war and peace and building a political
party: the former had to be broad and all-inclusive, as opposed to the
latter, which, by definition, has a more comprehensive (and self-limiting)
character.

Further irony: the cadres of
Socialist Action were once members of the SWP. They were thrown out
in the purges of the 1980s, when the SWP ditched Trotskyism for the
“wisdom” of Fidel Castro. In trying to recapture their glory days,
Socialist Action is ignoring the lessons of their own history.

But this isn’t about Socialist
Action – a group with about 30 members nationwide. It’s about the
widespread attitude on the Left – or, rather, what’s left of the
Left – that they’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. And
more: it’s about the whole “left-right” paradigm that divides
the oppressed and plays into the “mainstream” media narrative that
red is red, blue is blue, right is “reactionary” and left is “progressive’
– and never the twain shall meet. We see this on cable news shows:
both Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh profit from this, but the rest
of us lose big time. We lose because, although we may agree on
a vitally important issue – the futility and downright evil of a foreign
policy premised [.pdf] on perpetual war – we are prevented from uniting to
fight it because of outmoded ways of thinking.

As long as the organized antiwar
movement remains a leftist sandbox, where sectarians get to pontificate
– and do little else – it will stay a sideshow. Once we get beyond
all that nonsense, however, there are no limits to what we can do: just
look at the polls. The American people are with us – and they’re
ready to join us in our fight. Indeed, they’ve never been readier.
The question is: are we ready to receive them, and lead them?

Right now, the answer is
no: I’m hoping that – someday soon – the answer will be an
emphatic yes.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo